Cole, Dandridge MacFarland (1921–1965)

Dandridge Cole was an American aerospace engineer and futurologist who proposed a number of innovative
schemes for space travel and colonization. Cole started out to be a medical
student before becoming an engineer with General Electric's Missile and
Space Division and a teacher. In 1963, in a book coauthored with I. M.
Levitt, Dandridge Cole suggested hollowing out an ellipsoidal asteroid about
30 kilometers long, rotating it about the major axis to simulate gravity, reflecting
sunlight inside with mirrors, and creating on the inner shell a pastoral
setting as a permanent habitat for a colony.1 A year later, in
a book coauthored with Donald Cox,2 he suggested that such an
asteroid could be used as an interstellar ark or generation
ship to ferry a large human community to the stars. The "nomadic pseudo-earth,"
as Cole and Cox called their conception, would be hollowed out by "fusing
and sculpting" the space inside a captured asteroid using "heat from solar
mirrors." The result would be a "gigantic geodesic interior chamber," created
"in much the same way as a glassblower shapes a small solid lump of molten
glass into a large empty bottle."

In 1965, Cole coauthored Beyond Tomorrow: The Next 50 Years in Space (1965),3 in which he proposed various other space projects and
the use of cryogenics so that individuals
could travel great distances while in a state of suspended animation. He
also argued in the 1960s that huge space colonies might evolve into new
organisms called "Macro-Life" composed of innumerable living creatures.